The last two decades have witnessed a growing interest in theorizing literary narratives that address the South Asian diasporic experience. By and large, however, what has emerged is an academic consensus ... [more ▼]

The last two decades have witnessed a growing interest in theorizing literary narratives that address the South Asian diasporic experience. By and large, however, what has emerged is an academic consensus which accords an ever-greater visibility to mainstream diasporic voices from North America, U.K., some parts of Africa and of the Caribbean, at the expense of narratives dealing with South Asian diasporic communities that are based in other locations. Also, such critical consensus valorizes certain class-streamed patterns of migration over others, with the result of homogenizing the diversity of today’s South Asian diaspora. This special issue explores literary representations of the migrant experiences of those underrepresented South Asian communities based in locations such as South America, East Europe, the Gulf, West Africa and East Asia. [less ▲]

In their groundbreaking collection, Minor Transnationalism, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih advocate a new approach to transnationalism, which, by shifting the ground of analysis to “transversal” ... [more ▼]

In their groundbreaking collection, Minor Transnationalism, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih advocate a new approach to transnationalism, which, by shifting the ground of analysis to “transversal” movements of culture, departs from existing theoretical frameworks and allows for the emergence of “minor-to-minor networks” (8) that have the potential to circumvent the major altogether. Lionnet’s and Shih’s understanding of transnationalism not in terms of vertical relations between center and margin, but in terms of cultural transversalism, is particularly apt in the context of MG Vassanji’s writings, notably because his books often complicate those hackneyed notions of hybridity constructing Western locales as the privileged sites of plurality. In this paper, my contention is that Lionnet’s and Shih’s concept of ‘minor transnationalism’ also proves useful to deconstruct the discourse of ‘dominant’ Western-based diasporas that style themselves as “the legitimate archive with which to explore diasporic subjectivities” (Vijay Mishra, 3) — such as the hyper-visible ‘new’ Indian diaspora of global capital. Taking its cue from Lionnet’s and Shih’s concept of minor transnationalism, this paper looks at A Place Within (2008), the memoir of Vassanji’s travels across the land of his ancestors over two decades, with a view to showing how the author’s positionality as a ‘minor’ transnational (i.e. as a Canadian writer of Indian descent born on East-African soil) gives a new twist to the now-classic ‘return to the Indian homeland’ narrative — a staple, indeed, of the enormously popular Indian diasporic literature. At stake is the contention that Vassanji’s own brand of ‘minor transnationalism’ allows for a unique descent into the messiness of India, the ‘slippery’ nature of its past — well beyond diaspora’s dubious politics of retrieval and its investment in purist readings of the Indian homeland [less ▲]

In an interview closely following on the release of The History of Love, Krauss made it clear that, contrary to what some critics had ventured, her second novel was not about Holocaust survivors. “I am ... [more ▼]

In an interview closely following on the release of The History of Love, Krauss made it clear that, contrary to what some critics had ventured, her second novel was not about Holocaust survivors. “I am the grandchild of people who survived that historical event,” Krauss pointed out. “I’m not writing their story – I couldn’t write their story […]. What interests me is the response to catastrophic loss.” Great House, Krauss’s third novel, can be seen to further investigate this “response to catastrophic loss” – in a way which makes only tangential and mediated references to the Holocaust. The novel spans eighty years, starting from the near-end of World War 2, and traces the passing-on of a desk of massive proportions. Complete with nineteen drawers, one of which remains locked until it is symbolically revealed to be empty at the close of the book, the desk operates as some kind of trans-historical fetish for most of its successive keepers (and aspiring acquirers). Narrated through a set of five characters whose lives prove overshadowed less by the Holocaust itself than by its felt resonances in the psyches of loved ones, Great House is a polyphonic work that raises questions about the anatomy of ‘Holocaust postmemory’ (Marianne Hirsch), its temporality, but also its reification in conformity with defense mechanisms that take the form of death-denying fantasies. Here, while turning to the past, some clearly unreliable first-person narrators reveal their lifelong investment in fetishizing memories of themselves and others so as to better keep all sense of temporality and mortality at bay – in a way suggesting that fantasies of un-death have helped them fill in the gap left by the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust, and were later transmitted in lieu of ‘memory proper’. This paper will thus focus on Great House’s rich imagery, and its narrative strategies, in order to investigate Krauss’ representation of the paradoxes of Holocaust postmemory. [less ▲]

In today’s globalized India, not only has the outsourcing sector generated employment for some two million people, but it has also promoted the mesmerizing idea of a ‘new India’ of foreign investment ... [more ▼]

In today’s globalized India, not only has the outsourcing sector generated employment for some two million people, but it has also promoted the mesmerizing idea of a ‘new India’ of foreign investment, global markets, economic growth and expanding middle class. Drawing its workforce from an urban, college-educated Indian youth who receive training in ‘accent neutralization,’ the call centre industry offers the hope of rapid upward mobility, even if this involves working grinding shifts and faking an American name, accent, location, and time-zone. As against the somewhat cultish belief that ‘pretend-Nancy’ or ‘pretend-Bill’ (Susan Sontag) can reap the benefits of the corporate search for cut-rate labor, critics such as Harish Trivedi and Siddhartha Deb have proved highly critical of the ways in which the call centre industry results in creating a generation of ‘cyber-coolies’ and cultural emulators. A “public spectacle,” in Shehzad Nadeem’s words, outsourcing can be seen to promote an Indian fantasy landscape of high tech, virtual lives, and consumer culture that is reproduced and/or resisted in a growing number of cultural productions. Investigating TV series (Outsourced, Mumbai Calling), blockbusters (Slumdog Millionaire, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel), and documentaries (John and Jane Toll-Free, Bombay Calling), this paper will explore the cosmos of call centres from a cross-cultural perspective. [less ▲]

Until recently, in France, Albert Camus was regularly dismissed as a consensual writer and a minor philosopher -- for the dubious reason that his work figured too heavily in syllabuses for secondary ... [more ▼]

Until recently, in France, Albert Camus was regularly dismissed as a consensual writer and a minor philosopher -- for the dubious reason that his work figured too heavily in syllabuses for secondary schools. A year before the 50th anniversary of Camus’ death, issues about the memory of Camus in France started gaining new momentum in the face of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s attempt to have the author’s remains transferred to the Pantheon. Although Sarkozy’s ploy was successfully opposed by Camus’ son, who claimed (unlike Camus’ daughter) that moving his father’s remains would be contrary to the deceased’s wishes, the struggle over the writer’s legacy dramatically resurfaced a few years later. In Fall 2012, the project of a major Camus exhibition in Aix-en-Provence for Marseille-Provence European Capital of Culture 2013 was stalled, following on, first, the brutal eviction of its curator, French Algeria historian Benjamin Stora, and second, the consequent underhanded appointment of middlebrow philosopher Michel Onfray, before the latter’s final decision to back off from what he called “la pétaudière” (the madhouse). Given that the forced replacement of Stora by Onfray was pronounced by arch-conservative Aix-en-Provence mayor Maryse Joissains-Masini, the French and Algerian presses have been unanimous in interpreting Stora’s eviction as a result of his resolve to lay stress on one of the most silenced aspects of Camus’ work -- namely, his problematic status as a ‘French’ writer born on North African soil, and his impossible French/Algerian identity as a Pied-Noir who opposed both the OAS and the FLN. “What they did not like in him was the Algerian,” reads the Annex to Camus’ unfinished novel, The First Man. This paper sets out to examine how, beyond its escapist character, Camus’ ‘Mediterranean utopia’ still has a potential for raising unsettling questions about post-colonial Algeria and post-imperial France alike, in a contemporary context where a French apology for more than a century of colonization in Algeria remains overdue. [less ▲]

Mindful of the tunnel vision sometimes created by the privileging of ‘hybridity talk’ and matters of culture in discussions of texts by minority writers, Delphine Munos in After Melancholia reads the work ... [more ▼]

Mindful of the tunnel vision sometimes created by the privileging of ‘hybridity talk’ and matters of culture in discussions of texts by minority writers, Delphine Munos in After Melancholia reads the work of the Bengali-American celebrity author Jhumpa Lahiri against the grain, by shifting the ground of analysis from the cultural to the literary. Via interdisciplinary incursions into the domains of literary and psychoanalytic criticism, as well as into those of trauma and diaspora studies, Munos takes up “Hema and Kaushik,” the triptych of short stories included in Unaccustomed Earth (2008), as exemplary texts in which Lahiri redefines notions of belonging and arrival regarding the Bengali-American second generation, not in terms of cultural assimilation – which would hardly make sense for characters born in the USA in the first place – but in terms of a resymbolization of the gaps in the parents’ migrant narratives. Calling for a re-assessment of Lahiri’s work in terms of a dialectical relationship between (transgenerational) mourning and melancholia, Munos provides a compelling reading grid by means of which underrepresented aspects of the rest of Lahiri’s work, especially her novel The Namesake (2003), gain new visibility. [less ▲]

While Jhumpa Lahiri’s work might be thought of as one of the most emblematic instances of the popularity of today’s Indian-American diasporic literature, it remains that its hyper-visibility coincides ... [more ▼]

While Jhumpa Lahiri’s work might be thought of as one of the most emblematic instances of the popularity of today’s Indian-American diasporic literature, it remains that its hyper-visibility coincides with an odd form of critical invisibility. This is not to say that critical interventions on Lahiri’s three books have been nonexistent, nor could they have been in view of the fact that the author won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her first collection of short-stories, Interpreter of Maladies. But the vast majority of these readings takes as its premise that view that cultural assimilation and hybridity are still valid notions to investigate narratives focusing on members of the second generation, even as these descendants of migrants consider themselves Indian simply by virtue of their parents, so that they can only claim a second-hand knowledge of migration. Ignoring the difference between first and second-generation Indian-American diasporic experiences – and, what is more, overlooking the fact that the offspring of migrants, unlike their parents, “[do] not really have any other place [than the U.S.] to call home” (Lahiri) – such critical consensus ignores important aspects of Gogol’s complex trajectory in The Namesake. Worse, it proves highly unsatisfactory when it comes to discussing Lahiri’s recent collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, in which the second generation’s accession to early middle age calls into question various preconceptions on heritage and transmission. Can it be then that what is passed on from one generation to the next organizes itself less around positive, than negative entities, that is, around categories such as the gap, the absent, and the unsaid? Taking its cue from Vijay Mishra’s understanding of the diasporic subjectivity in terms of an impossible mourning, my dissertation examines the ways in which Lahiri redefines the notions of belonging and arrival as regards the Indian-American second generation not in terms of cultural assimilation – which would hardly make sense for characters who were born in the U.S. in the first place – but in terms of a re-symbolization of the gaps in the parents’ migrant narratives, more particularly in terms of the “phantom loss” haunting transgenerational relationships between migrants and their offspring. While investigating the figures of emptiness, spectrality, and the message, my dissertation takes various psychoanalytic theories by Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Nicolas Abraham, Maria Torok and Jean Laplanche, among others, as its major methodological tools. As against a critical consensus that overemphasizes matters of culture, such theoretical framework aims to revaluate the power of the literary in Lahiri’s work. Although this dissertation extends, at times, to Lahiri’s three books, its four chapters boil down to a close reading of the three texts constituting the “Hema and Kaushik” trilogy, which also form part 2 of Lahiri’s 2008 collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth. Through these three narratives, which all traffic with the dead-mother metaphor, Lahiri can be seen to inscribe the dimension of mourning at the heart of her approach to “generational arrival.” The three short stories of “Hema and Kaushik” indeed bring to the fore some unacknowledged facets of the much-idealized diasporic experience, which forces us to revise the cultural scenarios through which today’s contemporary world constructs, even essentializes, the figure of the migrant as an emblem of ultimate freedom. My close reading of “Hema and Kaushik” falls into four parts. Part 1 looks at “Once in a Lifetime,” the first text of Lahiri’s trilogy, with a view to showing how the apostrophic form of the text opens up a space of mourning which might blur the boundaries between absence and presence, return and arrival, self and other, but also positions Kaushik, for Hema, as a transitionary figure whose absence might well prove crucial in letting Hema-as-narrator acquire her own generational voice. Part 2 is devoted to “Year’s End,” and investigates the ways in which Lahiri employs the Gothic to represent the second generation as being haunted by its own belatedness in relation to the first generation’s experiences. The psychoanalytic theories of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, among others, will help me clarify how the dead-mother metaphor, in “Hema and Kaushik,” proves tightly interweaved with notions of transgenerational transmission, connection, and infiltration. Calling into question the possible unity of the “I” in the second text of the trilogy, Part 3 tracks the mole, so to speak, and bears witness to aspects of Lahiri’s work that are not all “in the words,” but “among the words,” to borrow Marcel Proust’s suggestive phrase, notably by revisiting aspects of “Once in a Lifetime” and “Years’ End” that are given a new significance through the interplay of the three texts of the trilogy. Relying on André Green’s concept of the “dead mother,” I will then propose an alternative reading of Lahiri’s trilogy in which Hema’s and Kaushik’s romance is only a surface-plot, enlisted to give representability to “the great unspeakable” of Hema’s life. In Part 4, Jean Laplanche’s description of the formation of the ego and the unconscious in relation to “early messages of the m/other” will allow me to look behind the curtain of transgenerational forms of melancholia, to that place where infinite longing is shown to organize itself not around any “real thing” but around a phantom entity whose idealization covers up the necessity to grapple with one’s involvement in a history of loss, which is also a history of guilt. [less ▲]

Although Bharati Mukherjee is famous, or rather infamous, for her shameless embrace of America and its melting-pot ideology, in Desirable Daughters India, the homeland, is unexpectedly made to re-enter ... [more ▼]

Although Bharati Mukherjee is famous, or rather infamous, for her shameless embrace of America and its melting-pot ideology, in Desirable Daughters India, the homeland, is unexpectedly made to re-enter the stage of immigrant identity construction. In many respects it would seem that it has now become untenable to represent immigrant identity in terms of a one-directional movement from “India” to “America.” In Desirable Daughters the rise of India, the accelerated time/space compression of late capitalism, the post-90s paradigm shift in matters of transnational migration, the emphasis on return migrations and the emergence of a new global interaction indeed dramatically outflank Mukherjee’s previous narrative of American “exceptionalism” – which suddenly seems dated by comparison. By portraying the complex transnational network of connections operating between RIs (Resident Indians) and NRIs (Non Resident Indians), Mukherjee’s book gestures towards the “de-spatialization” of immigrant identity construction and its consequent “re-metaphorization” in terms of “time zones.” What is more, the increasingly compelling influence of contemporary India on the Indo-American diasporic subjectivity marks a “back to the future” return of the repressed which temporally repositions migrant identity between a ghostly time of repetition and a “hauntology” of new becomings. What Mukherjee suggests, I will contend, is that immigrant agency and self-fashioning cannot be associated anymore with the “pioneering spirit” of forward-looking characters that discard their “Indianness” upon (geographical) entry into the West. In my reading of Desirable Daughters the protagonist’s zigzagging path to self-transformation will be emphasized, so that it will become apparent that time has become the fourth space through which new spaces for diasporic identity can be renegotiated. [less ▲]